Sweet Tooth's S2 Teaser Reveals How The Show Avoided Its Own Ugly Sonic
A new behind-the-scenes Sweet Tooth season 2 trailer reveals how the show avoids reliance on pure CGI, which dodges the "ugly" Sonic the Hedgehog problem. Contrasting its relatively dark source material, Netflix's Sweet Tooth portrays a post-apocalyptic world where politics and propaganda run rampant but are balanced by traces of hope, love, and peace. The show ingeniously highlights this contrast by using a bright, lush color palette as the backdrop of its bleak world and a roster of cutesy half-human, half-animal characters who do not get caught in the uncanny chasm of extreme CGI.
Comparatively, Sonic the Hedgehog's initial character design was met with immense criticism and social media fury. The look of the movie version of the iconic Sega video game speedster was denounced for its strikingly human teeth, fingers, and narrow eyes, and was even touted as "an abomination." Taking the overwhelming criticism seriously, Sonic's creators were quick to redesign the character and overturn the frenzy of memes coming their way. Sonic was not the first fictional movie character that fell deep into the uncanny valley of CGI, however. Cats' disturbing humanoid felines and The Polar Express' overly expressive animated characters received similar reactions and were unfortunately not able to reverse the damage.
RELATED: The Super Mario Bros. Movie Delay Could Prevent A Sonic Design Repeat
With minimal CGI and more practical real-life character designs, Sweet Tooth completely avoids the uncanny valley problem. Most of its hybrid characters are played by child actors who mostly wear prosthetics, which grounds their appearance in reality. Sweet Tooth actor Christian Convery revealed (via YouTube) that Gus's deer ears are real and
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